


till you face the looking-glass

by batyatoon



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Scene, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mirrors, Monsters, Psychological Horror, canon-typical disturbingness too i guess?, just a scene, not a complete story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 00:12:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19366420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batyatoon/pseuds/batyatoon
Summary: Build every bridge. Become every nightmare. Feast on every heart.What if the monsters in the mirror maze had been a different kind of nightmare?





	till you face the looking-glass

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains spoilers through episode 68 of Critical Role Campaign #2. Please do not post anything in the comments that might be spoilery for later episodes.
> 
> So a lot of us speculated that the inscription "become every nightmare" was about to come into play as soon as the Mighty Nein entered the mirrored room. Arguably, that's exactly what happened in canon ... but what I was expecting was something more like this.
> 
> Many thanks to aunt_zelda for helping me beat this into shape.
> 
> * * *

When their reflections step out of the mirrors, each fixed on a single target, the fight begins before anyone can do more than cry out in shock -- certainly before anyone can study them closely. It's hard to say, afterwards, when the enemy versions of themselves began to change. Whether the change happened suddenly or all at once; whether anything changed at all, or the differences were there all along and they somehow failed to notice.

(There’s no way they wouldn’t have noticed, Beau argues when they talk about it later. Some of their clothes were different, some of their _faces_ were different, even in the low light and the fog they would have noticed if their reflections had looked like that to start with.

And she doesn’t say it aloud, but the unease in her eyes says: _wouldn’t we?_ )

In the moment, there’s nothing they can do but fight for their lives, as it seems they’ve been doing for years if not forever. Fight off the nightmare versions of themselves, of each other, and try not to let themselves be too shaken by what they’re seeing in them.

The other Yasha is cold, even in her rage, with nothing in her eyes but contempt for the creatures in her path. She will smash them down without slowing, uncaring, barely noticing. No thunder builds in her shadow, no wings unfold at her back.

The other Fjord’s eyes glow golden, the same hue as the gem on his sword. The air around him is heavy and damp, smelling of seawater; the mist in the room swirls upward at his gesture, forms into serpentine tendrils. He’s smiling, a look of triumph and joy that makes him seem a breath away from laughing.

The other Jester is silent, cloaked and hooded in dull gray. The hood shadows her eyes so that only the lower half of her face is visible. She doesn’t make a sound, or look up from the floor at her feet, even as she stretches one hand upward to summon a hovering weapon -- it’s a club, made of some colorless wood, unadorned and massive.

The other Caleb blazes with power, from his polished boots to his short-cropped hair to the gold braid on his uniform, but even more than that he blazes with _certainty_. There’s no doubt or fear about him, not the faintest hesitation, as he lifts a hand and fire dances at his fingertips.

The other Nott is a distorted caricature of a goblin: filthy, mad-eyed, gibbering with vacantly hateful laughter.  Her grasping fingers are tipped with jaggedly sharp claws, her mouth bulging with a nightmarish array of teeth, some broken but no less vicious. She stinks, stomach-turningly, of stale urine and old blood and worse.

The other Beau smiles, smiles with perfect white teeth, coiffed and gowned with such intricate elegance as to make the knives in her hands look purely ornamental. She ignores blows as she fights, whether dealt to her or to anyone else; her voice never rises above a pleasant hum, and her smile never changes, and her eyes never blink even when her own blood trickles into them.

The other Caduceus is half rotted away and still moving. The lichen that once grew on his armor is cracked and gray, falling into dust, and his eyes gleam with nothing so wholesome as decay. There ought to be a smell of putrefaction about him, but there's only a dull chilly stinging in the nostrils, unnatural, sterile as salt. He raises his staff and that chill spreads outward, sapping the strength of whatever it touches; where he steps, things wither, and nothing grows from their remains.

It’s Nott who realizes, and shouts it to the others, that the mirror-creatures aren’t working in concert. It lets them formulate a hasty strategy to pick off one enemy at a time. Carrying out the plan makes the realization that much more troubling, as none of the mirror-creatures make any move to defend each other, or react at all when the others go down. The mirror-Caleb falls to a stunning blow and a sweep of a greatsword, and the mirror-Nott doesn’t so much as glance in his direction; the mirror-Fjord falls to a combination of crossbow bolt and arcane fire, and the mirror-Jester turns her back.

There’s some relief, at least, in seeing the downed attackers lose their borrowed shapes as they die. When the fight is over, the bodies littering the floor are featureless gray figures, and not (even in semblance) the corpses of their friends.

Even so, Yasha won’t look at them. Won’t look for very long at anybody else, either, as Fjord helps Beau to her feet and Caduceus touches Caleb on the shoulder to heal the one serious wound; not even at Jester, when she asks timidly _are you okay?_

 _Let’s go_ , is all Yasha answers.

 


End file.
